Over 200mm of rain hit places of north tassie last night, causing flash flooding the likes of which tassie hasn't seen for years, this is Latrobe from the air this afternoon:
Under these circumstances most people cant get around, it doesn't take much water on the road to stop a 2wd car, though people still try...
I enjoy going out in Snuffy (the patrol) on days like today, exploring, checking out the flooding, knowing that there’s not many places I cant get :)
I didn't find any places that were too difficult to get today, it was still fun!
I did find something unbelievable though, I drove Amy to Launceston this morning in Snuffy, she had an exam to be at, we left early in case there were any floods etc that we'd be forced to go around, on the way I thought we'd call into the dam we just finished a month ago to see how it fared, this is what it looked like on Friday:
That’s a photo from a few weeks back when we finished it - but the important thing here is the water level, it was at this level coming into this weekend, Sunday night it wasn't much higher than this.
To my surprise when we arrived this is what I saw:
This dam has a capacity of just over 100 ML (1ml=1,000,000 liters) - its pretty crazy that it could fill up overnight! And not only fill up, but run over the spillway a half meter deep!
You may not have noticed in that second photo but, take a closer look:
We are extremely lucky here, we need to do some maintenance on the dozer after this job, so we moved it up onto an undisturbed bank, fresh green, clean grass to work on (we had to spend a lot of time underneath it - and that really sucks in the mud!).
10 meters in front of and behind the dozer the land drops away several meters, our original parking spot was approx 20 meters in front of where the dozer is now, had we left it there to work on it... well, lets just say you wouldn't be seeing much in this photo...
This photo was taken this afternoon, the water level had dropped around half a meter by this stage.
Dams are never meant to fill this quickly the first time, for several reasons its best to fill them slowly, in this case we needed to keep water off the spillway to allow it to grow grass and become established before letting water over it (well established, grass growing soil doesn’t wash as easily) - but mother nature had other plans.. as a result the spillway took a lot of damage and we had to take our 3 ton digger down to do some damage control
Its not very often you go swimming with an excavator :)
What a crazy day!